Summer Moon of the First Harvests
Home. Back in the early 90’s when we lived on Edgcumbe Road in St. Paul, I felt a sense of 
homecoming when I crossed Ford Parkway. I had crossed into home turf. It’s taken a long while for a similar feeling to take hold here in Andover, but now, as I turn off Highway 10 onto Round Lake Boulevard, that sense of homecoming greets me.
Yes, it’s marked by Baker’s Square, Wendy’s, Conoco, Burger King and a Holiday station, but, they’re our franchises, there for our use. The feeling gets even stronger going up Round Lake and begins to thicken at Round Lake itself where the water is on the left and the peat bog fields of Field’s Truck Farms are on the right. Those fields are the remains of an old lake, eutrophied completely, a process that has advanced a good ways in Round Lake.
As I turn onto 153rd Ave NW, our property shows up about 1,000 feet in and I see the 6 foot chain link fence we had installed because Celt, our earliest Irish Wolfhound, climbed the four-foot fences to go greet passers-by on the street. This particular fence was put in place after a derecho felled a large poplar and destroyed the one we had originally extended from four feet to six. There is, too, the truck gate, 10 feet wide that we had installed because we wanted to get trucks from nurseries and our own trucks back onto our property.
The trees have grown up, grapevines have covered them, the prairie grass has morphed 
over time but has a pleasing current configuration. On the six foot fence itself, the border of the prairie grass, grows our wild grapes. Wild grapes that we pick in the fall for jams and jellies.
The driveway, the sloped driveway that creates its own stories in the winter, goes up to the three car garage that makes our house look as if we live as an adjunct to the garages. On the right going up is a rusted and unused basketball hoop, an emblem, as at so many homes, of a boy, now gone. In the garage itself we have a unique five stall dog feeding set up that we used when our pack was at its peak and we had five Irish Wolfhounds at once.
Do you see what I mean? Home has an accretion of memories, memories attached to physical things like lakes and peat bogs, fences and basketball hoops. This is not somebody else’s memories but our memories, our family’s memories. It is those memories, those thick layers of past embraced constantly in the present, that make a 
home.
Inside the house are the same layers of memories, of guests and friends and immediate family, of dogs and workmen, nights and days, meals and passion. It is the thickness, the particularity of it all, that makes this our home and not someone elses. After 20 years, we have laid down many layers of smiles, tears, hard work and love. That’s why this is home.
